When editing images you can totally go over board with a heavy Photoshop hand. For me I absolutely love to use Adobe Lightroom for most of my editing, I tend to go as minimal as possible when it comes to my editing style. I feel that a minimal edit will give a true to life image, without making your subject look plastic. With Lightroom you can make easy adjustments to exposure, shadows, clarity, and contrast/saturation with a simple slide of your mouse. You can import a multitude of presets or even create your own presets to use on different photo sessions. Lightroom enables you to import a complete session and view all the images at once verses Photoshop opening one image at time. From Lightroom you can export to Photoshop for more intensive editing.
When I use Photoshop I use it for major editing like, removing wall sockets, major blemishes, adding textures, using the liquefy tool to take a few pounds off a family member, or even switching faces if i have a major “blinker”. But from Photoshop I always save back to Lightroom and do my final finishing all my images there. So for the most part Lightroom, for me, is a One Stop Shop, import, edit, and export the final image as a Jpeg.
Below I have an example of an edit to a family session. This was a winter day in South Texas, we don’t get snow and rarely do the leaves on the trees change colors. With this session the family was dressed, for the most part, in warm winter clothing. Sweaters, jeans, and boots. You can see that is family had picked a neutral color palate for their wardrobe with a dark blue accent color. The mom wanted to focus on Gold being the primary color for her 1 year old daughter, so she and her husband also incorporated the gold theme in their outfits. As you can see the surrounding location didn’t scream “Winter/Fall” with all the green leaves, so in Lightroom I chose a preset that I thought told the story of a Winter/Fall location color palate. Then I modified the preset as I needed, I brightened up the shady part of the fathers face with the Adjustment Brush tool and vamped up the exposure on that side of his face. Fixed a couple spots on both Mom and Dads face and brightened up everyones eyes. I always want my subjects to be the main focus in any image so I use the Radial Filter to create a circle around my subjects and lower the exposure surrounding them to draw your eyes into the family unit. I tend to use the black slider more them most, I use this filter to increase the amount of dark areas or blacks in the image which makes all the other colors POP. In affect I’m increasing the contrast between colors without using the contrast slider which usually makes the skin tones change.
To finish you can export the image straight from Lightroom to a Jpeg for easy uploading to your website. In the Export task bar you can also add a watermark, save a compacted image by size, quality, or even limit the file size to what you need. The use of these editing programs is to minimize the amount of time you spend editing each image. An image shouldn’t take you more them 5 min to edit- time is money. The more time you spend on an image the less profit you will see. Don’t get me wrong I have been know to get “Lost” editing a session where 4 hours can pass in no time! But I try to limit myself to the amount of editing I do.
When you see my images on my website they have all be completely edited to what I feel is a final product. Some photographers upload unedited images for their clients to see, but some clients can’t visualize a final product unless you show them. If additional editing is needed or wanted by my client I have no problem re-entering an image to give them exactly what they want!
